Among the many and varied delights of YouTube, there appeared, in the summer of 2017, a video purporting to show a Muslim man, on his way to Friday prayers at Regentâs Park mosque in London, being detained and searched in the street by Metropolitan police officers.1 He had aroused suspicion by wearing more layers of clothing than might be expected on such an unusually warm English summerâs day. A passer-by filmed the incident on a mobile phone and the nonplussed suspect can be seen patiently enduring as much of a full body search as propriety and the outdoor location allow, while the police defensively explain the nature of their concerns. The incident passed off peacefully enough. Its rather flimsy rationale was testimony to a city on edge after a series of terror attacks across the summer months. However, in the use of police powers to stop and search a member of an ethnic minority without any evidence, the incident recalled one of the more controversial tactics of a previous era, when black and Afro-Caribbean youths were regularly detained under the so-called Sus law.2 Nowadays, those under the spotlight are more likely to be âvisibly Muslimâ, but the principle remains the same. As such, this vignette tells us something about the continuities between historical and contemporary anxieties associated with ethnic minorities who may notionally be accepted as British but who are, nonetheless, not trusted to behave in the same way as their supposedly law-abiding fellow citizens. Many of the anxieties around the evolution of Britishâand by extension Westernâaccommodation of new migrants in the years following the end of the European imperial phase are, likewise, bound up in the incident. This question of trust and multiculturalismâtrust in multiculturalism, we might sayâis at the heart of this book.
All successful relationships are built on trust, as all successful societies must also be. Trust offers an important lens through which one can understand relations between Muslim and non-Muslim at this fraught moment in history. Trust also yields to study through a number of paradigms: psychological, philosophical, political, phenomenological and so on. In this volume are a collection of chapters from a variety of disciplines, brought together with the aim of providing a more wide-ranging view of the operation and frustration of trust. In multicultural societies particular historical pressures come to bear on social trust, and there has arisen a range of views on how best to organise society and relations within it. At the present moment, if we seek to build a more trusting society then one of our most urgent tasks is to address the breakdown of trust between Muslims and others.
Not all of the many definitions of trust available to us capture its essentially dialogic nature. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), quoted by Marek Kohn, defines trust as âconfidence in or reliance on some quality or attribute of a person or thing, or the truth of a statementâ (Kohn 2008: 9). This is too broad, since it tends to conflate the confidence one might have in a âthingââpossibly an inanimate object such as a carâwith the trust one might actively place in a person or persons. In the former case, we may have confidence that the car will function well, which might in turn be based on trust in its human designers, mechanics or even the driver. However, this is different from trust placed in other people directly. Moreover, the OED definition implies trust is a one-way street. We are doing the trusting and the definition says nothing about what might come the other way in the arrangement, which puts the one in whom trust is placed in a passive position: something that is not often the case with this most interdependent of acts. Instead, if we venture our own definition of trust as an investment of belief in reciprocal socially oriented intentions and actions in another (or others), we see more clearly that there is an implied mutuality involved in placing trust. We also see that what applies to individual interactions is also true of bonds between different constituent parts of a group or nation. We place trust in our leaders to govern us, but more insistently, we place trust in others in our day-to-day interactions with them. Onora OâNeill makes the point that we supposedly live in a world where trust is breaking down all around us: surveys repeatedly show low levels of trust in politicians, the police, the health service, the legal system and (especially) journalists. Despite this generalised mistrust, she points out, we still âconstantly place active trust in many othersâ every day (OâNeill 2002: 12).
Trust depends on the assumption that an otherâs best interests will be compatible with ours. Marek Kohn cites Russell Hardinâs âencapsulated interestâ model where, in order to trust, we must believe that othersâ interests incorporate our own (Kohn 2008: 10). It is this mutual relianceâand what happens when it breaks down or is erodedâthat makes the question of trust so compelling for the field of intercultural relations. It is central to overcoming the distance between people and therefore at the heart of what multiculturalism has been about. Yet, within modern multicultural societies, the glue of historical fellow feeling often taken to be central to social and cultural trust is sometimes felt to be absent. In the same way, can we always be sure that the vision of society projected by elites on behalf of the majority will always encompass the good society as envisioned by minorities? In Europe, the tensions that have come to exist, at least at the level of political rhetoric, between established populations and those migrants whose numbers have swelled in the last 60 or so years are in part due to the collision of Enlightenment traditions of political philosophy and the inequitable legacies of the empire.
Multiculturalism is broadly understood to reflect an acknowledgement of the fact that modern Western nations are composed of diverse ethnic and cultural groups. In some casesâsuch as the so-called settler nations of the United States, Canada and Australiaâimmigration is perforce part of the national narrative. However, the countries of Europe have been slower to embrace diversity, at least as a political challenge, in spite of their own long histories of imperial contact and conquest. For example, despite the fact that Britain is itself composed of different cultural and even national communitiesâin Scotland, Wales and Northern Irelandâthe concept of âmulticulturalismâ comes only to have meaning when applied to (generally) non-white arrivants from the former colonies in the post-Second World War period. In political science, this is seen mainly through the lens of legislation: governmental intervention to safeguard or allow for cultural practices different from those of the majority. In his book, Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea, Tariq Modood defines multiculturalism quite specifically as âthe political accommodation of minorities formed by immigration to western countries from outside the prosperous Westâ (Modood 2007: 5). This definition helps capture something of the way in which the present multiculturalism debate follows certain lines of logic and argument familiar from the earlier discourses of race and racism.
Yet, there is a difference between multiculturalism as a political ideal or legislative programmeâso-called state multiculturalismâ and multiculturalism as the lived experience of many, especially in urban areas. Bhikhu Parekh usefully distinguishes between the two when he says that âThe term âmulticulturalâ refers to the fact of cultural diversity, the term âMulticulturalismâ to a normative reply to that factâ (Parekh 2006: 6). Yet, it is precisely the elision between these two very different phenomena that gives the current debate its divisive and sometimes even poisonous quality. At the present time, much vitriolâas well as more reasoned concernâis aimed at Muslims as a fractious minority whose activities are often supposed to point up the folly of a too generous accommodation of difference. The slippage from criticism of an allegedly misguided set of policies prioritising minority interests to a hostile repudiation of difference tout court could be seen in the 2016 British âBrexitâ debate and made itself felt physically in the upsurge of racist and Islamophobic attacks that followed Britainâs vote to leave the EU.3 Suddenly, what were taken to be specific grievances about sovereignty and bureaucracy splayed out into a generalised hostility to foreigners, indicating the proximity of that resurgent populist nationalism that has arisen across Western Europe and beyond in recent years and old-style racism.
But, even if we restrict ourselves to multiculturalism as accommodative state practices, we are still, in the case of Britain, dealing with something slightly chimerical in nature. Britain has seen no equivalent of Canadaâs 1988 Multiculturalism Act, enshrining the recognition of different religions, cultural practices and languages within the nation. Strictly speaking, to talk of anything as coherent as a set of multicultural policies is also inaccurate, since those accommodations with minority representative groups that were enacted tended to happen at civic level in areas with a high-minority ethnic concentration, such as Bradford and Birmingham. While the various countries of Europe have found different ways to incorporate (or deny) diversity, in Britain it is hard to call the series of hesitant moves and recommendationsâbeginning in education provision but spreading to other walks of lifeâa âmulticultural policyâ, despite the insistence of some of its critics. For such critics, multiculturalism appears to be everything from a conspiracy, or a brazen movement designed to destroy British values, to a generalised set of (usually mythical) concessions to minorities, or an all-purpose bogeyman to be trotted out when there is nothing else to hand on which to blame the state of the nation. Indeed, multiculturalism has come under attack in recent years from foes on both the right and the left: the former attacking it for weakening assumed cultural-national bonds and the latterâoperating from a secularist perspectiveâcriticising its schismatic tendencies and its potential for manipulation by the late capitalist market system (West 2013; Malik 2009; Zizek 1997).
When we are tempted by politicians and the media to see multiculturalism as being about a dilution of Britishness brought on by the claims of fractious immigrants, we would do well to remember Bhikhu Parekhâs rather different inflection: âMulticulturalism is not about minorities ⌠[It is] about the proper terms of relationship between different cultural communitiesâ (Parekh 2006: 13). Hence, our interest here is in whether multiculturalism as it is currently understood can help build trust between communities or whether it must inevitably lead to withdrawal, special pleading and mistrust.
Most of all, in the political realm, multiculturalism is experienced as a challenge to Western secular democracyâs liberal roots. Laden
and Owen
have described how:
Reflection on the rights of peoples is contemporaneous with the emergence and development of modern Western political thought. While the issue of religious toleration was brought acutely to the fore as a topic for philosophical and political reflection by the confessional conflicts that ravaged Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is equally true that, at the same time, the European encounter in the New World and in the colonial empires that emerged from this encounter raised the issue of the rights of peoples. (Laden and Owen 2007: 2)
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